Week 12 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Jeremiah 20.10-13; Psalm 68/69; Romans 5.12-15; Matthew 10.26-33

"The free gift is not like the trespass". It is a statement of Saint Paul that really should be in lights over every place where the gospel is preached. It should be spoken in the light and proclaimed on the housetops.

Why so? Because more often than not our real faith reaches only to something less than this. We fall back into thinking that the free gift meets the needs and desires of the ones who have trespassed. It is a gift, yes, and free, yes, but trimmed to the measure of our need. As if God is simply 'our god', the solution to our problems, the answer to our questions, the one to set things right for us.

So often we understand grace in the shadow of the trespass - of our sin and weakness, our need and desire - when the truth is that grace, as Paul goes on to say, bursts these bounds, it 'abounds for the many' ('many' meaning the generality, humanity, in other words all of us). Paul's hymn in exaggeration of grace (so we might think) continues: If the reign of sin means death for many through one man's disobedience, 'much more surely', 'much more surely' - he says it twice! - will the reign of grace mean life for the many through the obedience of the one man Jesus Christ.

The teaching of Jesus - his parables, miracles and discourses - is with a view to shocking us into an appreciation of the reality of grace, that in God's kingdom different standards apply. He speaks of different criteria of justice, reconciliation, community: the first will be last and the last first, more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, prostitutes and tax-collectors go in first - there are so many paradoxical sayings, to us often seeming simply contradictory.

We are more comfortable with an arrangement that fits into what we manage to establish as 'justice'. We are more comfortable, truth be told, with fearing God than with loving God. We know more about the first, arising from sin and its consequences, than we do about the second, coming to us as grace and a new creation. 'Fear no one', Jesus says in today's gospel, 'do not be afraid'. But we are afraid, preferring the familiar fear of sin and punishment to the awe and wonder that accompanies the unknown height and depth, length and breadth, of God's boundless love.

What might it mean for us, that love? What might it yet ask of us? Better the fear you know than the love that is mysterious, all-consuming, re-creating (which means first de-creating, undoing, requiring a new birth).

Jeremiah, in the first reading, is once again a 'type' of Christ anticipating in his experience what Jesus would undergo. The Lord proves himself to be a mighty champion, saving Jeremiah from his enemies. God did not spare his own son, however, but gave him up for us all. The most remarkable 'rescue' then takes place, the Resurrection, which is not just the restoration of life to what it was before but the initiation of a new creation. The free gift is not like the trespass. The risen life is not like death. The fear that so often holds us is not like the awe and wonder that fills the disciples as they encounter the Risen Lord, glimpsing thereby the glory of God's love.

"Every hair on your head is counted." How crazy is that? It is just one more indication of the criteria that prevail in the kingdom of God, a kingdom whose only law is the limitless love of this tremendous Lover for each one of his creatures.